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I'm a floater. I do find them sensitive, but they work for me. Add a footer div in a floated site is a breeze, no JavaScript required

Obviously, I've not used the "Inman position clearing" since I don't use absolute positioning to design my websites, but I share the concern about having a layout that is dependable on JavaScript to work.

Sorry, but what he (Andy Clarke) said is completely false and should be given the Old Yeller treatment, back of the woodshed and all.

While floats do have their issues, they're nowhere near as bad as positioning, which can break at the slightest change by the user (resizing the text for example) or if there isn't enough content in the viewport (possibly due to the current browser window width for instance) to push a positioned element below another one.

Floating doesn't have this issue, though I'd rather wait a decade to use CSS 3 in MSIE than use positioning for layouts.

You just need to understand the box model and what contributes to the width of elements to keep floats stable. When i'm making a layout with floats I often just create the pixel perfect width's so that it's stable and add a simple inner container that I can apply the border / padding to.

What bugs me though is the various techniques I have to use to please IE, height: 1&#37;; overflow: hidden; display: inline; position: relative etc etc...... Like Dan, I can't wait for a better protocol for site layout..

I'm all for floating too but if you understand absolute positioning and can create robuts layouts which I'd expect someone like Andy Clarke to be able to do then I don't see anything wrong with it.

However, people who use software to drag and drop to create absolute or relative positioned layouts is a different matter all together.

Personally though, float's are easy to use once you understand them and their potential problems so I'll continue to use them until we can start using things like grid positioning and multi-column layouts.

Position absolute is old time page layout Netscape 4 Layer time, even Dreawweaver 8 emphasis on it in design view

It’s maintenance heavy if there is a lot of change, in content , content height

The full way of Layer Layout had a very short live as view-port design or what was called DHTML in 1997 , heavily relying on (Java) Script control of Layers , usually staying on one page, screen, this made Dreamweaver Famous
It was completely overshadowed by the fact that Tables could be used for layout, tables basically made it possible to move images any ware on screen , and the WWW rocket launch had a boost that still last, unfortunately ?, CSS what can we do with it, who needs it, time ?

There has not been a question recently in the CSS forum on this kind of design that I know off

You can make use of position absolute for special purposes, fine tune your design or special needs

Flow or Float models are the way to go at the moment, but you never know, since IE 7 has better support for position absolutes , you can do newer other layouts that work cross browser